Clarence Page: Diplomacy goes bizarre

It is really not so odd that we would
find Dennis Rodman partying heartily with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. After all,
they have so much in common. Think of Kim as Rodman with less height, fewer
piercings, more nuclear menace — and more blood on his hands.

They also both love basketball,
self-promotion and keeping the world guessing about their sanity.

At least Rodman’s motives for this
match-up are easier to guess. What else is a former NBA star, long past his
glory years, to do after having played out all of the more conventional avenues
for washed-up celebrities to feed their heavy attention addictions?

The retired rebound artist with the
Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls in their 1990s glory years has startled the
world with such antics as wearing a wedding dress and blushing-bridal makeup to
promote his memoir in 1996, claiming appropriately to “marry” himself.

He’s also dyed his hair in a multitude
of day-glo colors and married Baywatch beauty Carmen Electra for all of nine
days before their annulment.

Yet at a time when he was becoming
so-o-o-o last century, the Dennis formerly known as a menace found a new way to
make jaws drop again: Pal around with a nuclear terrorist.

That’s Kim, North Korea’s cherubic third-generation
despot who resembles the Pillsbury Doughboy with a high-top fade haircut and a
Mao suit.

Their bizarre basketball diplomacy
occurred during a trip to Pyongyang sponsored by VICE Media for an HBO
newsmagazine show to debut in April.

In a country that is infamous for mass
starvation and enormous prison camps, Rodman dined, watched a basketball game
that mixed members of the Harlem Globetrotters with some North Korean players,
and hung out for two days with the famine-ridden country’s supreme leader.

After his return, Rodman sounded like a
grateful stooge for Kim’s propaganda efforts. He called Kim “my friend” and “a
great guy” and urged President Barack Obama to respond to Kim’s requests for a
phone call.

When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed
out the great suffering brought by the regime’s deplorable human rights record,
Rodman bizarrely compared it to President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal and
pleaded for Kim to be given another chance. After news of his views hit the fan
that day, Rodman’s other scheduled interviews were abruptly canceled without
explanation.

Yet as the White House responded with
denunciations of Rodman’s freelance diplomacy, noting that the U.S. has its own
“direct channels of communications” with Pyongyang, the trip makes one wonder,
could this be the start of something diplomatically bigger?

Remember the historic 1971 U.S. pingpong
team’s visit to China that led to President Richard Nixon’s opening of
diplomatic relations. Rodman eagerly offered a similar bridge-builder.
President Obama loves basketball and so does Kim, said Rodman: “Let’s start
there.”

Fat chance. The North Korean regime has
been so uncooperative and irrationally belligerent with the rest of the world
that even their biggest ally, China, seems barely able to tolerate them.
President Obama, like his predecessors, prefers to deal with North Korea in
partnership with China, South Korea and other regional powers.

Even so, the regime has cut itself off
so much from the rest of the world that, as Col. Steve Ganyard, a former deputy
assistant secretary of state, told ABC, Rodman might know more personally about
Kim than anybody at the CIA — “and that in itself is scary.”

A 2009 Washington Post profile found
evidence that Kim was a major Bulls fan while secretly enrolled under the alias
Pak Un in a Swiss boarding school between 1998 and 2000. The story describes
him as a big basketball fan at that time who “proudly showed off photographs of
himself standing with Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant of the
Los Angeles Lakers.”

If true, basketball opens another peak
into the strange mindset of a leader who may not be in complete control of his
own restless military establishment. Like Rodman, he wants attention and
deserves to have it, although not necessarily in the way that either of them
wants it.

CLARENCE
PAGE’s column is distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

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